Social media is one of the biggest digital revolutions that has transformed every aspect of our life. In recent years, the influence of social media has extended to wealth management as well, with more and more High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI) turning to social media for better investment decisions. A study by Cogent group shows that more than five million HNWI in the US and Canada use social media to help with their financial decisions. As a result, they are less likely to have a financial adviser when compared to non-social media users.

The big question is what drives them to use social media over traditional investment advisers.

Firstly, the traditional methods of investing do not appeal to Gen X and Gen Y investors because they are more tuned to technology than their older peers. Most of them have grown up seeing or using some form of technology such as computers, so they understand its potential and want to make the most of it.   As of now, 70 percent of Gen Y investors and 44 percent of Gen X use social media. When the millennial generation becomes affluent, the usage of social media for wealth management is only going to increase because they will be more adept in using social media.

Besides the age and mindset, the availability of information makes it easier for HNWI to make better investment decisions. Social media gives users a larger information stream that comes through many voices. This vast amount of information reduces the chances of impulse and rash decisions, which means users are more likely to evaluate their options before investing.  This is why nine out of every ten HNWI investors use social media for their research. Moreover, 70 percent of investors have changed the way they interact with an investment provider or have reallocated their investments because of something they have read on social media. These numbers go to show how a majority of HNWI trust the information on social media and are willing to manage their finances on their own.

Other than the above factors, another important reason is that the existing investment technologies used by traditional investment advisers do not appeal to many HNWI. Research shows that only 49 percent of HNWI feel comfortable with the technologies used by their advisers. This is why HNWI are two times less likely to delegate their financial research and decision making to an investment professional.

All these reasons affirm the growing influence of social media on the investment decisions of HNWI. Currently, it is estimated that 74 percent of HNWI use some form of social media and this has gone up from 52 percent in 2008. Going forward, the number of users using social media for wealth management is only going to go up due to rapid technology adoption and transfer of wealth to the millennial generation.

Above statistics show how social media has evolved into a platform for wealth management. Inspired by the success of HNWI investors, ordinary investors are also likely to embrace social media in the future for their investment decisions.

This growing use of social media presents enormous opportunities for financial service providers. It is time for these providers to change their business practices to proactively adopt social media as a part of their marketing strategy.

The post Social Media’s growing Influence among High Net Worth Investors appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Cloud is pervasive and is used across all sectors to do a ton of things. It’s no longer about corporates using it to gain business value and intelligence, rather it’s become an integral part of our everyday life. In fact, many small businesses and charity organizations are leveraging the power of cloud to improve their performance, efficiency and operations.

New York food charity called City Harvest specializes in collecting excess food from farms, grocers, restaurants and manufacturers and gives them free to more than 500 soup kitchens, community pantries and other community-based kitchens in New York.

One of the important aspects here is that City Harvest doesn’t move manufactured or cooked food., which means, it has to collect the raw ingredients like fruits and vegetables and deliver them quickly to community kitchens. During all this, it has to track the full chain custody of the food that is collected and delivered.

This charity has a fleet of 22 trucks and two tractor-trailers that make about 20 stops each day to collect and deliver food. Such a complex system requires high levels of operational accuracy and planning, and this is why it has turned to the cloud for help.

What it’s done is to have mobile apps that are used by drivers and the agencies to which it delivers. This gives it the ability to communicate in real-time. For example, when a driver makes a stop at a location, he or she can know what is available for pick-up. Once he posts it on the app, community kitchens can decide right away what they need and the same will be delivered to that kitchen within the shortest possible time.

The obvious advantage with such a system is that the food is collected and delivered fresh, so healthy meals can be served by these kitchens. Secondly, there is little to no waste and every kitchen gets to pick what they want from the available items. This way, City Harvest acts as a perfect bridge between the givers and users, and in the process ensures that no food is wasted.

Since all this data is stored in the cloud, there’s no more paper work involved. According to James Safonov, the IT head at City Harvest, it used to take the charity almost five days to reconcile paper work. With cloud, the same reconciliation is done in minutes, thereby saving the staff a huge amount of time and effort.

This additional time and effort is being spent in innovation and improving the efficiency of operations and getting more suppliers to their list.

For agencies and suppliers, this app helps them to see where their food is getting delivered. They can even get an understanding of the allocations made among community kitchens in real-time. This information can help them also to plan better.

For the users of community kitchens, this app is a blessing, Called Plentiful, this app helps them to register for food assistance and see what’s available in pantries and food kitchens. As a result, their wait time is reduced significantly and also eases administrative tasks for food providers and community kitchens.

Overall, a great example of how you can leverage the power of cloud.

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On the heels of a phenomenal earnings quarter, Adobe has released another product called Adobe Experience Cloud that is designed to give companies everything they need to provide excellent customer service every single time.

With this product, Adobe has unified all its digital businesses into a single cloud platform. In a way, such a unified product makes sense for Adobe because it’s been having its services all over the cloud.  Now, it’s Creative, Document, Marketing, Analytics and Advertising are combined into Adobe Experience Cloud, so companies can access all that they want from a single location.

To give you a perspective on what this includes:

• Adobe Marketing Cloud – It comes with a set of solutions that empower marketers to create their unique marketing campaigns, create customer experiences that help them to stay on top of competition, and connect and engage with customers.
• Adobe Advertising Cloud – This is the first dedicated cloud that allows users to manage all their advertising campaigns across different media in one place.
• Adobe Analytics Cloud – This is the business intelligence engine that provides deep insights into businesses.
• Adobe Creative Cloud – This helps to streamline and enhance creative workflows.
• Adobe Document Cloud – This cloud allows users to sign and send any document from any device.

For individuals though, they can still have access only to Creative and Document because the others simply make no sense to them.

According to different strategists, this move by Adobe is great for many reasons. Firstly, it gives a unified system for Adobe to make the most of the acquisitions it’s been doing over the last two years. More importantly, it can simply plug future acquisitions into its own ecosystem, so they can start making revenue for the company right away.

Secondly, Adobe Experience Cloud will refactor all the existing applications, so they can leverage common data, content, analytics and processes. Such a move is sure to make applications and the entire system more integrated and efficient. From a customer’s point of view, it is a complete system where data can be shared and collaborated across different services.

Thirdly, companies like AWS and Microsoft are creating their own ecosystem to entice customers to use their apps. Adobe is unique because it offers a more creative set of tools that are hugely popular, and this is one of the biggest selling points of the company. With a unified cloud system, it can leverage on this strength and increase its customer base.

Lastly, it opens up new possibilities for Adobe as well as others that want to develop apps based on Adobe’s platform. For example, it’s artificial intelligence product called Sensei can be used to build models and distribute data generated by these models to other services within the platform. Such an opportunity for sharing and collaboration can be a great starting point for companies that want to develop apps based on it.

In all, Adobe Experience Cloud can truly enhance the experience of using a cloud-based product for customers, and for Adobe, this can signal the next big step in its transition to a complete cloud-based provider.

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In a bid to take on competition and to boost its own marketshare in the cloud CRM market, Salesforce has decided to add Service Cloud Einstein to its portfolio. Dubbed as the world’s best intelligent customer service platform, Service Cloud Einstein helps companies to better manage the complexities of customer service with the help of artificial intelligence. Released during Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference last year, this product is the summation of all artificial intelligence efforts from the company.

Service Cloud Einstein create an intuitive experience for customer service agents and their managers, and in the process, improves their overall efficiency and productivity. For a customer service agent using Service Cloud Einstein, it routes the call to the correct agent using a feature called Einstein Case Management. This feature uses machine learning to automatically escalate calls if needed. In other cases, it classifies them into different categories, and brings up the case resolution management for the agent, thereby making it easy for him/her to handle customer requests and queries.

In addition to providing case resolutions, these platforms collect initial information through chatbots, and pulls up any relevant information about the customer. Obviously, such prior information can prepare agents to better handle customer calls. It also gives the necessary background information to add a personal touch to customers.

Service Cloud Einstein works great for customers too, as every case is prioritized and handled efficiently. It evaluates a case based on its level of emergency, and in the case of high priority cases, it automatically routes them to the best agent within the shortest time possible. As a result, customers can get their issue handled quickly and efficiently.

Such a system is sure to add many layers of business value to any organization. Firstly, when customers get quick and personalized service, they tend to be happy. This translates to good satisfaction levels, and that customer is likely to stay with the company. This factor alone can save thousands of dollars for companies, as it is estimated that any marketing campaign spends almost ten times to attract a new customer than to retain an existing customer.

Secondly, this system works well for agents, as they have all the information required to handle a customer’s call. This is sure to keep them engaged and satisfied, which translates to a low attrition rate.  Again, companies get to save money as they don’t have to spend often on finding the right candidates and training them. Experienced employees will tend to stay back, and this is sure to increase the overall productivity and bottom line revenues of the company.

Lastly, Service Cloud Einstein collects information and provides an intelligent analysis of the same. In other words, this will give more insights into customer call patterns, nature of problems and customers’ behavior. Armed with such information, managers can offer a higher quality of service to customers in the future.

In all, the addition of Service Cloud Einstein can boost the productivity of clients in a big way, and in the process, will improve the marketshare of Salesforce too.

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Dropbox and Slack, two well-known and widely used cloud-based products, have rolled out new features to attract more customers.

The common theme among the new changes is scaling the existing products to work for the entire company instead of just a small team or group. Currently, both these services have a common weakness, which is their tendency to create fragmentation and reinforce silos because only a small group of workers can adopt them for their own use. Typically, it’s only for a team or an informal group of workers who have to collaborate together.

Though the existing features make it convenient for small groups of people to use them, it creates problems for IT departments as the existing features do not support a company-wide collaboration and use. That has changed with these new enhancements.

Dropbox’s new feature called “Dropbox Smart Sync” allows users to view all the files stored in the cloud, in their local machine as well. This way, the storage space needed in local machines can remain the same, and yet users can browse through unlimited data, and even download just what they want. An example released by the company shows that users working with just 128 GB of hard drive space can browse through terabytes of data to find what they want. Once they identify the file they want, they can simply download it to their local machine. Earlier, users needed a web browser to log in and view files, but those additional steps are not needed now.

Another new feature from Dropbox is called “Paper”, that is expected to provide a flexible platform for employees of different departments to collaborate with each other for creating, reviewing, and editing documents within an organization. Both these features encourage a company-wide access, rather than just small groups.

Like Dropbox, Slack has also expanded its features. The Slack Enterprise Grid allows companies to create an unlimited number of workspaces, so different groups can work together, and at the same time can collaborate across different groups. Currently, only a single workspace exists for the entire organization. While this may work for an organization with about 500 employees, it can get too overwhelming for an organization with say 20,000 employees. To overcome this restriction, Slack’s new features make it convenient to create many small workspaces, so it can be scaled for the entire organization as well.

This feature comes with an administrative layer to help wrap everything together and to manage all the different workspaces and communications. All this means, as an employee, you can find employees who are in other departments and workspaces and collaborate with them if you have to. But, you won’t have to read through all the messages that transpire in the other groups.

These new features from both Dropbox and Slack augur well for users, and more importantly, it shows a growing and maturing cloud market. The rolling out of such features means these companies are eyeing for a larger market share and want to stay on top of competition. Such developments are sure to increase cloud adoption, that in turn, can make collaboration and working much easier, simpler and more convenient than before.

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Have you ever wondered what thoughts run in your customers’ minds when they decide to buy or not buy your product? These thoughts can determine whether a particular person is going to buy your product or not. Much of these thoughts are based on a range of factors such as the level of customer service they get from the company, quality of a product, personalization, and more.

A survey conducted by Harris International shows that one in four adults in the US do not feel any brand royalty, while 56 percent of respondents said that they’ll switch brands to get better customer service and personalization. This study makes it clear that customers are still the kings, and companies have to compete with each other to grab their attention.

How can cloud help?

Cloud can provide the infrastructure to store and analyze vast amounts of data that can provide insight into the patterns and behavior of customers. In fact, technologies like machine learning and predictive analytics are based on the cloud.

Machine learning is a process by which you “train” machines using algorithms to look for patterns. When you help these machines to “learn”, they can help you find patterns that humans are sure to miss, especially when you’re sorting through zillions of data.  Moreover, machine learning when combined with cloud is a powerful tool as it can access huge data sets including those that are generated on social media, besides information collected by your company. With such huge amounts of data and extensive computing power, it’ll be easy to get the insights you want about your customers.

The best part is you can provide a personalized experience for each customer, and this is sure to boost their loyalty towards your brand. A case in point is the interactive customer service approach by European soccer club Real Madrid. Whenever any user connects with them on social media or visits their website, machine learning algorithms divide them into different subgroups. This strategy is based on the fact that every customer has a different reason to connect with the club. Some customers may like certain players, some would like to know the team schedule, and others might just like the team as a whole.

To give a personalized experience, they are divided into subgroups, and they’re given information based on the sub-group to which they belong. For example, if a fan likes Cristiano Ronaldo and he connects with the team on social media to know more about him, then he gets updates when Ronaldo makes appearances, scores goals or does anything else. This way, that fan gets just the personalized information he wants. Such a customer experience is possible only due to the emergence of cloud, and technologies like predictive analysis that use it.

There are many such examples, where companies have benefited by understanding their customers better. They’re also in a better position to use targeted marketing strategies to increase their revenue and profits.

In this sense, cloud has become a vital tool for providing superior customer service.

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